Replies

Those are absolutely preposterous and defamatory accusations. Your vicious accusations are as false as the ones made by Nazis and Communists against the Church. The slander campaign against the Catholic Church and the memory of Pope Pius XII was started with Rolf Hochhuth’s play, Der Stellvertreter, (The Deputy in Broadway). This play initiated in 1963 a campaign of denigration falsely accusing the Pope as responsible for Jewish deaths by failing to protest publicly Nazi atrocities.

History contradicts Hochhuth’s vicious slander. Already in 1945, Moshe Sharett, Israel’s first Foreign Minister, and later second Prime Minister, met Pius XII and said: “I told him that my first duty was to thank him, and through him, the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Jewish people, for all they had done in various countries to rescue Jews, to save children and Jews in general.”

Jewish historian Paidiel, of the Yad Vashem, stated that “monasteries, convents, shrines, and religious houses were opened to the fleeing Jews, and their needs attended to, without any overt intention to steer them away from their ancient faith, solely to abide by the preeminent religious command of the sanctity of life. Through this, they epitomized the best and most elevated form of religious faith and human fidelity.”

Hochhuth’s outrageous assertions, while dismissing public declarations of gratitude given by the founders of the Sate of Israel for the rescue of Jews sponsored by Pius XII and the Catholic Church alleging that such leaders were misinformed or playing politics. In fact, there is not a public figure in the world who has received so many expressions of gratitude and recognition by the Jewish community as Pius XII.

Jewish historian and leading authority on the Holocaust, Jeno Levai, has shown that the Pope did not remain silent when his word would save lives. Levai, the only foreign Jew invited as an expert at the Eichman trial in Jerusalem, spoke in defense of Pius XII in the courtroom and repudiated Hochhuth’s judgement unreservedly. In 1963, when the play opened, a number of diplomats accredited to the Vatican during the war publicly rejected the playwright’s thesis, most notably among them, Dr. Robert M. Kempner, deputy chief U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.

Kemper, who had access to the Secret Services and of Hitler’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs archives, revealed that Pius XII and the Catholic Church sent a great number of protests, direct and indirect, diplomatic and public, secret and explicit, to which the Nazis never responded. Kemper publicly defended the role and charity endeavors of Pius XII

Some of the most outspoken diplomats in defense of Pius XII were Wladimir d’Ormesson, member of the French Academy, Albert von Kessel, attaché to the wartime German embassy, Ambassadors Grippenberg of Finland, Gunnar Haggelof of Sweden, and British Minister to the Vatican, Sir Francis d’Arcy Osborne. In point, Mr. D’Arcy’s letter in protest to the play was printed in the program for the West End performance of the Hochhuth’s play in London by order of the British government.

In “The Deputy” Hotchhouth tried to break the bond created during the war between Jews and Catholics. In his play “The Soldiers”, Hochhuth tried to implicate Winston Churchill in the death of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, President and Commander in Chief of Armed Forces of the Polish government in exile in London. This time Hotchhouth didn’t find an audience willing to accept such a foul slander, in stark contrast to the Pius XII’s smear that appeals to anti-Catholic bigots who are always ready to attack the Church no matter how preposterous the charges. David Frost (the famous English interviewer) discredited Hochhuth in front of television cameras.

General Sikorski died in a plane crash over Gibraltar and the unscrupulous playwright waited after the death of Winston Churchill to follow the same tactic of character assassination he used in his play written after the death of Pius XII. It seems that the former militant in the Nazi Youth movement couldn’t get rid of the hatred towards Jews, Catholics and the Allied leaders, instilled in his soul by his Nazis indoctrinators.

THE FORGOTTEN VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST. The persecution of Catholics.

Without belittling the unspeakable horrors suffered by Jews, we should not ignore the fact that millions of Catholics were also victims of the Holocaust, as were gypsies, homosexuals, and in much less scale, Orthodox and Protestants. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe and was the only country where there was a mandatory death penalty for those hiding Jews. Many, who were caught sheltering Jews, were killed in a gruesome manner, such as being publicly burned as a warning to others.

Although not every Catholic was a victim of the Nazis, it is certain that all the Jews were victims of Hitler’s hatred. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was targeted to the total extermination of the Jewish race-an abhorrent and unforgivable crime against humanity.

We should keep in mind the prevailing situation of complete despair throughout Europe at the beginning of the forties. The Germans already occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Norway; and the invasion of the Soviet Union was going on while England was being bombed daily in preparation for the eventual invasion. The United States stayed out of the war until December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American naval base in Pearl Harbor. The neutral nations, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Sweden and the Vatican, were the only temporarily remaining free territories. Without any military force, all the Pope had was his powerful moral pulpit to encounter the all powerful and victorious German troops. Although the Vatican was neutral, The Church and its flock were being brutally attacked and decimated in the Nazi’s occupied countries.

According to historian William J. O’Malley, S.J., “to the genocide of six millions Jews we have to add nine to ten millions Slavic victims (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs) who were eliminated-not in war, not as saboteurs, not as guerrillas, but sorely because they were Slavic.” The Nazi’s genocide, based on race, should also include half a million gypsies who, just as the Slavs, were executed because they were not member of the superior race, the Aryans. The Nazis in Poland alone murdered more than 3 million Catholics together with over 3 million Jews. (13)

About 2,800 clergymen were interned between 1940 and 1945, at Dachau, the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Among them, 2,579 were Catholic clergymen, 109 Protestants, 30 orthodox and two Moslem clergymen. The Catholics came from 38 nations; 1,780 were Polish, 447 German and Austrian, 109 Czech and Slovaks, 50 Yugoslavs, 156 French, 63 Dutch. The auxiliary Polish Bishop of Wladislava died of typhus while imprisoned at Dachau. At least 1034 died in the camp, some victims of medical experimentation by the infamous Dr. Rascher. In 1940, 800 priests died in Buchenwald, 1,200 in 1942 and 3,000 in 1943. And that was just in Buchenwald.

As O’Malley, pointed out, “That figure, surprising as it might be, does not include the clergy or nuns who were shot, beheaded or tortured to death in squares and alleys and jails all over Europe…In France, in February 1944, the Gestapo had arrested 162 priests, of whom 123 were shot or decapitated before ever reaching any camp. According to the International Tribunal at Nuremburg, 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen and 300 at Sachsenhausen, and there were hundreds of other camps in the network. Nor does the total figure of 2,771 take into consideration that one-quarter to one-third of those shipped to any camps often arrived dead.” (14)

Polish Cardinal Stephan Wyszynski, in his prison memoirs, notes that he was the only member of his ordination class who escaped the concentration camps; seven died in Dachau; of the six who survived the concentrations camps, several soon died as the result of torture and medical experimentation. It is estimated that the Nazis imprisoned half of the Polish clergy.

The Pope not only had to answer to the pleas from the Jews, but also to those from his own flock. Quite an extraordinary burden to bear. In March 1942 a shattering letter from the Polish Archbishop Sapieha arrived to the Vatican: “Our condition is in truth most tragic, he wrote to the Pope, deprived of almost all human rights, delivered to the cruelty of men lacking for the most part any human sentiment, we live continuously under horrible terror in constant danger of losing everything, either by trying to escape or by deportation, or incarceration in the so-called concentration camps, from which few come out alive. In these camps thousands and thousands of our brothers are held, without any judicial trial, people wholly innocent. Among them there are many priests, secular and religious…to these things the typhus is now added spreading more and more daily.” (15)

Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage.

Catholic martyrdom was rich in examples of courage. When Msgr. Andrew Szeptyckyi was consecrated as Archbishop of Lwow of the Ruthenians, he asked the Pope during the ceremony, an explicit vocation for martyrdom. With that idea he approached Himmler personally on behalf of the Jews; their fate rent his noble spirit. There were many Catholics such as Oskar Schindler and St. Maximilian Kolbe who in brotherly love risked and even offered their own lives in behalf of the Jews.

Hitler, a self-proclaimed pagan, considered the Catholic Church on par with the Jews, as his mortal enemies.

It is documented that Hitler planned for the total obliteration of the Church. For Hitler Jews and Christians were the sources of every evil. “The heaviest blow to humanity” he once said, “was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of Jews.” In his diabolical mind, the extermination of the Jews would be needed for victory. Hitler designed and implemented a plan at Warthegau, in western Poland, to extirpate the Catholic and the Protestant churches from Europe. There is documentation that Count Von Galen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Munster, who was an outspoken critic of the racial and eugenic policies of the Nazis, if it were not for the prominence and prestige of his position, would have been annihilated

In 1942, Pius XII told Fr. Paolo Dezza, rector of the Gregorian University, “They want to destroy the Church and crush it as a toad…there will be no place for the Pope in the new Europe, they say that I am going to America, I have no fear and I shall remain here.” (16) Among the many ideological fundaments shared by the Nazis and the Communist was the hatred for religion, specially the Catholic Church. The only form of worship allowed was the cult to the leader of the totalitarian state. Hungarian Cardinal Mindszenty went from a Nazi jail to a Communist jail after the war. There was no respite for Catholics after the War; in fact, the persecution of Catholics increased in the Soviet occupied countries.

In occupied Poland, Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church…

Arthur Greiser was in charge of the annihilation of the Catholic Church and the creation of a national German Church loyal to the Führer in Warthegau. The final goal was the complete Germanization of that Polish region, to which end Greiser worked without respite. Bishops were driven out, priests killed or imprisoned. Within a few years one third of the pre-war 2,000 priests were dead and 700 imprisoned; seminaries were closed, the Catholic press and voluntary associations suppressed. The Holy See found itself desperately fighting in two fronts, for the survival of the Jews and for the survival of his own flock. The Church in a beleaguered Poland was being bled to death by the two great scourges of humanity, the Nazis and Communists. In Poland three million Catholics went to their death along with three million Jews at the Nazi’s concentration camps in addition to the millions murdered by the Soviets.

It is documented that, according to Robert M.W. Kempner, former U.S. Deputy Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, among the measures scheduled to follow upon Hitler’s victory were the following: “every Catholic State must select its own Pope”…(and) “the Bishop of Muenster will go before the firing squad one day.” Every propaganda move by the Catholic Church against Hitler’s Reich would have been not only “provoking suicide”, but would have hastened the execution of still more Jews and Priests. These and similar threats appeared in the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, the nazi theoretician of racial purity, and in Hitler’s Table Talk.

Millions of Catholics were victims first of the Nazis and later of the Communists.

Most Catholics were anti-Nazi and anti-Communist. We should not forget “the fact that hundreds of thousands of anti-Nazis from communist occupied territories as Poland, the Baltic States and Bessarabia, were sent by Moscow to German concentration camps, while hundreds of thousands of anti-Stalinists refugees living in Nazis territories were sent by Berlin to the Soviet concentration camps” as part of the Stalin / Hitler’s diabolical pact. Shamefully, the Western democracies did the same after WWII; thousands of anti-Communists who fled the Soviet Union during the war were forcedly deported to the Soviet concentration camps, the dreadful gulags. Entire families opted for suicide rather than deportation.

Jewish organizations and the Holy See work together in the rescue of Jews.

The efforts of the Vatican, in coordination with Jewish organizations, to save the Hungarian Jews during those tragic months is well documented in the chronicles of the Holy See day by day, week by week. On March 25, 1944 the Apostolic Delegate in Washington, Msgr. Cicognani, informed the Vatican that the Jewish War Refugee Board were urging that measures be taken to aid the nearly 2 million Jews from Hungary (and Romania) and the Polish refugees who were living under terror and persecution and now threatened with extinction.

The Nuncios insisted, many times unsuccessfully, that the baptized Jews had all the rights of the non-Jewish Catholics, and for the other Jews they demanded that they be treated according to the norms of fundamental human rights. Nuncio Msgr. Rotta protested to no avail to the prime minister, Dom Sztojay, and to the foreign minister himself: “The very fact of persecuting men merely on account of their racial origin, is a violation of the natural law.” It is estimated that Msgr. Rotta alone had given over 80,000 false baptism certificates as a safeguard for the Jews, but, as the Hungarian Foreign Minister replied to the Nuncio’s protestations, “the problem is one of race, which is not changed by baptism.”

The atrocities multiplied and the nuncio, as head of the diplomatic corps in Budapest, mobilized the Ambassadors of the four other neutral Nations. On August 21, Rotta and the envoys of Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland, presented a very strong protest to the government. The deportations were “unjust in their motive-for it is absolutely inadmissible that men should be persecuted and put to death just because of their racial origin- and brutal in their execution”; (21) said the draft note written by Rotta. The indefatigable Nuncio and the Holy See continued their struggle in favor of the Jews.

On October 29, The Holy Father sent an open telegram to Hungarian Cardinal Seredi asking for a special day of prayers and a collection to help the Jews. Encouraged by the Pope, the Hungarian priests and religious opened their houses to the Jews. In the end, in spite of all the efforts, about 550,000 Hungarian and refugee Jews had died; 150,000 survived in Budapest and 40,000 in the provinces. As Jeno Levai, the foremost scholar of the Holocaust in Hungary, said of Pius XII that it was “a particularly regrettable irony that the one person in all occupied Europe who did more than anyone else to halt the dreadful crime and alleviate its consequences is today made the scapegoat for the failures of others.” (22)

Slovakia

The most heartbreaking and humiliating case for the Holy Father was that in Slovakia the head of State, Tiso, was a Catholic priest and the population mostly Catholic. Slovakia was a protectorate of Germany since 1939, and as such, the racial anti-Semite laws were applied. Dr. Livia Rotkirchen of Yad Vashem, affirms that it may be said that the letters of protest delivered by the Vatican during the years 1941-1944 prove sufficiently that the Vatican objected to the deportation of Jews from Slovakia and later added that they were backed by numerous oral pleas and protests. As everywhere else, the clergy and religious took Jews into hiding.

Unfortunately, there were other cases where the Catholics supported the Nazis. Some Catholics betrayed one of the main tenets of their faith, “to love your neighbor”, and were involved with the Nazi terror. But one cannot blame Pius XII, nor the Church for the actions of those who strayed from the faith-any more than one can not put the blame upon the Jewish leaders for the fact that there were Jewish Kapos and Jewish policemen who helped the Nazis enforce their extermination policies.

There are allegations that The Church helped some Nazis war criminals escape to South America after the end of the war. While it is fully proven and documented that The Church helped over 800,000 Jews to escape from certain death, there is not a single proven case of a Nazi criminal who had been helped to escape by the Vatican. That does not mean that there may exist a case in which a clergy helped a Nazi to escape, but certainly, not with the knowledge, and much less the approval, of the Holy See. We must not forget that the Nazis tortured thousands of Catholic priests and nuns to death.

To those seeking the truth, what a better witness than the testimony of Albert Einstein, the great Jewish physicist, who had first hand experience of the horrors of Nazism? In 1944 he said: “Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, but the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of newspapers, but they, like the universities were silenced in a few short weeks. Then I looked to individual writers…they too were mute. Only the Church,” Einstein concluded, “stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth…I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel great affection and admiration…and am forced thus to confess that what I once despised, I now praise unreservedly.”(33

DTA:

1. Baloney!

2. Alois Cardinal Stepinac was actually tried by Tito's Communist "Yugoslavian" government on these spurious charges and found innocent, was he not?

3. If all that Pius XII did was save Catholics, please explain Golda Meir's eulogy of Pius XII at the UN, Israeli diplomat Pinchas Lapide's written work in his support, and Oxford historian (and Jewish intellectual) Benjamin Martin's many works on the subject all of which credit Pope Pius XII with saving nearly 1 million Jews and Albert Einstein's tribute to Pius XII and the Church as the only force in Europe raised to save the Jews, and Chief Rabbi of Rome Israel Zolli converting to Roman Catholicism AFTER the war and taking as his baptismal name Eugenio (Pius XII's baptismal name) while making public testimony to what he had observed personally of Pius XII's heroic defense of and interventions on behalf of the Jewish residents of Rome. Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and non-Catholic made significant efforts to save many Jews and was murdered for his efforts by the same soviet union that instigated the smears against Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church.

4. Those interested in the truth ought to review the brilliant 180-page annotated bibliography of these controversies by William Doino, Jr., which makes up nearly 2/3 of a relatively recent book (2003 or so) called The Pius Wars.

5. The free world and humanity generally are better off by far because of the early death from kidney failure of Yuri Andropov soviet general secretary and former KGB boss (whose second in command of KGB was Mikhail Gorbachev) who paid for Muhammed Ali Agca's attempted assassination of John Paul II and personal assassin of the Hungarian anti-soviet revolutionaries in 1956.

6. There was a centrist political party in Germany in about 1933 which was identified as Catholic and caved before Hitler's political power and potential to harm them individually but that party should not be confused with the German Catholic Church itself much less with the Vatican or Pope Pius XII. Cardinal Faulhaber (the Lion of Munich) and many other Catholic hierarchs publicly defied Hitler and the Nazis.

7. George Will once wrote that the Balkans had produced the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and triggered World War I but had also produced much, much more in the way of tragedy over the centuries than could be consumed by the residents of the Balkans themselves. That there are bloody intramural wars waged among the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Herzogovinians, and the Montenegrans is an historical given. That anyone outside the Balkans cares to share the self-inflicted misery of the Balkans and their residents is NOT a given. One suspects that it is the internecine strife of the Balkans coupled with the fact that Croatia, whatever its shortcomings which, in this Catholic's opinion, do not BEGIN to approximate those of Serbia, is Catholic that lead you to make this sorry attempt to blacken the reputations of Pius XII and Alois Cardinal Stepinac. If you want to serve the soviet libel factory, that is your business but you have chosen a strange venue to regurgitate communist lies.

8. Pius XII's Roman Catholic Church maintained an underground railroad from Central Europe westward through Franco Spain thence to Spanish Morocco and North Africa and wherever thereafter to bring Jews out of Europe from under Hitler's nose. The Chassidic Jewish Reichmann/Gestetner family of postwar Montreal who owned the Olympia and York construction contracting firm came out of Hungary through that route as did hundreds of thousands of others.

9. Apparently you want to read into what you claim to have been Vatican action to send a Croatian dictator to postwar Argentina some suggestion of Nazi sympathy. Pius XII's Vatican, at his express orders, also saved atheist communists from "Yugoslavia" by hiding them in the Vatican from the Nazis. Hiding communists did not make Pius a communist. Assisting Pavlic would not make Pius a nazi. As to making Alois Cardinal Stepinac a cardinal, you are going to be really angry when Stepinac is canonized in spite of the smokescreen of soviet lies against him.

10. Are you Serbian or is your ancestry among the other little anti-Catholic tyrannies that abound in the Balkans? I can sympathize with anyone in the Balkans who suffered under Tito or under what amounted to Nazi satellite governments. I can respect the Orthodox Churches which have such great similarities to the Catholic Church, have the Mass, have all of the sacraments and have apostolic succession. I cannot sympathize with the relentless campaign of lies against Pope Pius XII. Nor can I sympathize with the poisonous nationalisms of the Balkans (any of them) which have worked such evils dishonestly attributing those evils to the Roman Catholic Church or to the Orthodox Church. I eagerly await the canonization of Pope Pius XII, raising him to the honors of the altar, which is very long overdue.

11. Finally, the Roman Catholic Church is a Church and is headquartered in the Vatican. The pope of any given time is the head of that Church, the Vicar of Christ on Earth. The Vatican City is also a national government with the pope of any given time as its monarch. As a government, the Vatican takes up secular responsibilities in addition to its obvious religious functions. The Vatican used its accredited diplomatic corps to facilitate the escape of Jews (among others) from nazi clutches. It used its legal authority to crate passports. It used its ability to accept new people as Vatican citizens. It used Vatican radio and L'Osservatore Romano, its newspaper, to combat naziism and communism. The Vatican has a secret service and maintains intelligence networks. Ask any former soviet stooge, if you know any, what role John Paul II's Vatican played (along with Reagan and Thatcher) in bringing down the Iron Curtain and the soviet union itself a scant eight years after Andropov ordered him killed.

12. Hitler was utterly incapable of bringing the Roman Catholic Church to an end. Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church and guaranteed to be with it to the very end. The Roman Catholic Church has buried the overwhelming majority of its enemies. The rest will follow by the end. Note that neither the Roman Empire, nor the third reich nor the soviet union are any longer among the existing regimes on earth. It was in all the bibles.